given to the ostensible author by a novelist named Rutherford and concerns Hugh Conway, a mutual acquaintance. Conway and three other Westerners had been passengers on a plane hijacked from an Indian city during a revolution. The plane was never recovered, but Rutherford found Conway a year later suffering from amnesia in a Chinese hospital. The strange story that Conway related after he regained his memory is the body ofLost Horizon.

The four Westerners—Conway, Charles Mallinson, Roberta Brinklow, and Henry Barnard—were powerless to act even when they realized that their plane was being hijacked. Their pilot died after the plane crashed on a ridge high in the Himalayas, and they were saved only because a party of hillmen found them and escorted them to a lamasery named Shangri-La.

The lamasery proved to be comfortable, civilized, but remote. Chang, the leader of the rescue party, assured them that porters who could return them to the outside world would be arriving in a month or two, and that until then they were to be guests of the lamasery. The only other person whom they encountered directly was a young Chinese woman named Lo-Tsen, who entertained them on the piano.

The Westerners reacted differently to their stay. For reasons of their own, Brinklow and Barnard decided to remain. Mallinson himself was anxious to leave, but in the meantime Conway had learned that they were not in Shangri-La by accident. Soon afterward, he was admitted to an audience with the lamasery’s High Lama. The aged man told Conway the story of Father Perrault, a friar who had made his way to Shangri-La in the early eighteenth century and who miraculously lived on and on. It was only toward the end of this account that Conway realized that the High Lama himself was Perrault.

In this and subsequent conversations, the High Lama described the lamasery’s rediscovery over the centuries by various travelers. Outsiders aged slowly in Shangri-La’s air, it seemed, but aged rapidly if they left. Recently, the trickle of travelers had ceased as a result of war and revolution, and so the High Lama had authorized the forced recruitment of new individuals. He shared his vision of a sanctuary that would preserve civilization from the destruction he foresaw for the outside world, and he finally suggested that Conway was destined to be his successor. With this revelation, he died.

At the same time, Mallinson learned that the porters whom Chang had mentioned had reached a point several miles away but would set off again shortly. Mallinson had convinced Lo-Tsen, with whom he had fallen in love, to accompany him. Conway tried to explain that Lo-Tsen was actually an old woman, that her age would reassert itself if she left the valley, but in vain. Torn between remaining in Shangri-La and helping Mallinson, Conway finally decided that his greater loyalty was toward his friend.

In an epilogue, the author described a later meeting with Rutherford, who had tried to track Conway after he had disappeared on another journey. Rutherford did not find Conway—or Shangri-La, where he guessed Conway was headed—but offered several bits of evidence that the story might be true. The most tantalizing came from the doctor who had treated Conway. Rutherford learned that the Englishman had been accompanied by an extraordinarily old Chinese woman who had died shortly after conducting him to safety.

Shangri-La

Shangri-La. Lamasery in the Karakoram mountains of Tibet, situated on the lower slopes of a peak called Karakal (“Blue Moon”), whose elevation of 28,000 feet makes it nearly the equal of Mount Everest. The lamasery consists of a group of blue-roofed pavilions, delicately poised on the mountainside above a fertile valley. The lamasery is rich in decorative Chinoiserie but it also has an excellent library. Although it is on the site of a much older Buddhist lamasery, its present construction dates from 1734, when Father Perrault—then a Capuchin friar—took up residence prior to developing his own syncretic amalgam of Eastern and Western religious ideas. It is, therefore, a hybrid erection, grafting modern Christian ideals onto a Buddhist base, looking up all the while at an unscalable peak.

Shangri-La reminds Conway, just a little, of Oxford University. Having been deeply disillusioned and spiritually wounded by World War I and its aftermath, Conway naturally looks back to his college days with deep nostalgia. Common parlance calls Oxford a “city of dreaming spires” and a collage of “ivory towers,” and Shangri-La’s architecture and elevation are presented in similar terms. Its loftiness is, however, associated with a particular kind of atmosphere: clean, refined, and exceedingly beneficial to the health. The text carefully points out that “la” is the Tibetan word for a mountain pass, emphasizing that the lamasery is also a metaphorical gateway, offering a passage to a way of being that is far superior to anything available in the modern, civilized world.

The valley below the lamasery is a peaceful utopia whose citizens are happy to submit to the benevolent dictatorship of the lamas. Laws are unnecessary to ensure order because the valley’s inhabitants are so carefully schooled in courtesy that disputes never become violent. All this is part of a legacy, an estate, in both senses of the word, which Perrault now desires to leave to a suitable heir. If Conway were an aristocrat he would probably have an estate awaiting him at home, but he is not, and his sense of duty is oriented toward the grandiose political institutions and ambitions of the British Empire rather than to the stewardship of a tract of land. It is not until he has forsaken his estate that he realizes its true value.

Baskul

Baskul. Remote outpost of the British Empire on the northwest frontier of the Indian subcontinent, to the northeast of Peshawur (Peshawar). Baskul represents the furthest edge of the decaying empire, beset by rebellious confusion. To its south lies the most troubled region, while the untracked wilderness of the Himalayas lies to the north. It is an obvious backwater, beyond the control or influence of any diplomatic presence.